Mississippi (4 of 5)
by Foxsong
Summary: Love, death, the Consortium, and people who are not what they appear to be. **2001 Spooky winner.**


Chapter Seventeen

Mulder drifted slowly back to consciousness, nagged awake by the insistent throbbing in his right shoulder. 

His head lolled to the side and his eyes fluttered open. He was lying on some kind of thin padding over a cool, hard surface; he felt rings of metal around his wrists and knew his hands were cuffed in front of him. In the dim light, he could make out the open boards of what looked like basement stairs.

Stairs. The basement of... Paula's house? 

He had a metallic taste in his mouth and a hazy recollection of the horror he'd felt when the stiletto had spilled out of the fallen purse with the rest of her belongings. He remembered trying to back away, trying to reach for his gun; he remembered the sudden, overpowering vertigo that had brought him helpless to his knees instead. He remembered Paula leaning over him, and the strange, surreal calm of her voice as she spoke to him. He wished he could remember her words, but they had faded in the red-tinged haze that had taken his sight as he had lost consciousness.

Slowly, tentatively, he flexed his arms; he lifted them enough to bring his watch into view, but save for the cuff his left wrist was bare. He sighed and closed his eyes again. Trying not to move his painful right shoulder, he reached his left hand across to his right hip, groping for the phone that was, as he had expected, also gone. He let his hands fall back across his waist.

He opened his eyes, and turned his head, wincing, and tried to take a look around. Across the basement, he saw a little window set high in the concrete wall. The sunlight outside was bright, but no rays angled in to relieve the half-darkness where he lay; it must be midday, he reasoned. He hoped it was only the first day. He wondered what she had used to drug him. He wished he had a little water.

Midday. If this was the first day, then it was Friday, and Paula would probably be at work. Mulder lay still, for how long he could not tell, listening for some sound that might tell him she was upstairs. His head was beginning to ache as well, and it was hard to concentrate, hard to keep from slipping back into that darkness. 

The silence was thick all around him. He was reasonably sure he was alone in the house. He looked over again at the little window. Even handcuffed like this, he thought, if he could get to it he could probably break it open. Maybe he could find a way to crawl through it and get outside. Maybe he could make it to a neighbor's house...

He moved the fingers of his right hand experimentally. It didn't seem to make the pain in his shoulder any worse, and he took this as a good sign. He tried bracing his left hand behind him, but that pulled his right arm all the way across his body, and the pain sharpened. He caught his breath and fell back again onto the thin quilt.

There just wasn't any other way to do it, he reasoned. He had to roll over to the left in order to put his good hand down in front of him and lift his upper body so that he could get his feet underneath him. It would only be for a moment, he encouraged himself. It might be the only chance he would have. He had to try it.

He took one great, determined breath, and rolled onto his side, heaving his head up, slapping his left hand down onto the floor, trying to catch his balance. The pain flared and blossomed, white-hot, and he thought he could actually hear the ends of broken bone grinding in his shoulder as he moved. A sickening wave of nausea hit him and he collapsed, moaning through clenched teeth. 

He lay gasping on the cold floor, the room whirling wildly around him. His last plaintive thought as he surrendered to the darkness was of Scully.

Chapter Eighteen 

"Answer," Scully muttered under her breath, pacing back and forth in front of the little desk, tethered by the phone cord. Outside her hotel-room window the sky was steel-grey with clouds. The phone rang again. "Answer, damn it."

She pressed her fingers to her aching forehead. She should have started sooner, she thought yet again; she should have gotten started right then, right after breakfast, as soon as she knew. Just then someone on the other end of the line picked up the ringing phone.

There were some muffled fumbling sounds before she heard a cautious voice. "Hello?"

"Langly?" she asked.

He paused as if considering his answer. "Uh... yeah?"

"Langly, it's Scully."

"Scully?" he repeated, evidently surprised. "Um -- hey. Want me to shut off the tape?"

"The what?" she said, and then remembered that they habitually recorded all their calls. "I guess it doesn't -- I don't know. Look, I need your help."

"What kind of help?" Byers chimed in, and Scully's temper, already short, flared. 

"What is this? A party line?" she snapped.

"A conference call, Agent Scully," Frohike's voice explained.

"Oh." Scully stopped her pacing and sank into the chair by the desk. "So that's what that noise was."

"I *told* you they could hear it over the phone!" Langly exclaimed irritably, and Frohike immediately shot back, "They can't when *I* set it up!"

"Guys, stop it," Byers interjected, and Langly's voice cut short its retort. 

"Sorry about that, Agent Scully," Byers continued. "We'd be glad to help you. What do you need?"

"I can't find Mulder," she said bluntly. She hated the sound of it, hated the words and what they said about her own helplessness.

"Can't find him?" Byers said above the murmurs of concern from the other two. "Where are you, Agent Scully?"

"Louisiana," she said. "A town called Donaldsonville. We were working a case." She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the heel of her hand, her elbow propped against the desk. "He didn't show up for breakfast this morning."

"And he wasn't -- where are you, a hotel?" Frohike asked. "And he wasn't in his room?"

For the first ten minutes that morning, it hadn't even occurred to Scully to notice. There was Eastern standard time, and there was Mulder time; ten minutes either way was nothing out of the ordinary. She'd gotten her coffee and her yogurt and a particularly irresistible almond croissant, and she'd pulled her notebook out of her bag and flipped it open to the pages she'd been working from, and waited for him.

"I didn't look for him right away," she admitted to Frohike.

After waiting for twenty minutes, she had not only noticed, but had let it sour her whole mood. She was very well aware that he'd gone out again after dinner the night before. She had gone outside for a walk, telling herself the cool evening air would clear her head and help her fall asleep when she came in. She could almost convince herself that she hadn't been specifically looking to see whether there was a light in his room. She had simply happened to glance up as she walked through the courtyard at the back of the hotel; she had simply happened to notice that his window was dark.

"Ah," Frohike said after a moment, and that seemed more incriminating to her than anything else he could have said.

"I was... I thought it was just a miscommunication," she lied. "So I left right after breakfast and drove up to Natchez by myself."

"Natchez?" Byers asked. "Isn't that in Mississippi?"

"Yes. It's almost a four-hour drive." She'd wished Mulder was along once she got there, too; she was stonewalled when she inquired at Crouse-Hinds, her FBI badge notwithstanding -- or, she thought, maybe that had just made it worse. Each man she questioned just referred her to the next one along the line, and no one gave her a straight answer about anything. Getting back into the car to head back to Donaldsonville, she put the key into the ignition and hesitated. She almost reached for her phone, but then let her anger get the better of her again. What Mulder did on his own time was his own damned business, and she would never say a word to him about it, but this was the FBI's time now. This was *her* time, damn it. She turned the key and started the car.

"So when did you realize he was actually gone, Scully?" Langly asked.

"It must have been almost seven o'clock." She sighed, massaging her forehead with her fingertips. "I tried his cell phone a couple of times on the way back, and I kept getting his voice mail. He never called me back." She had called the sheriff then, too, and he was as mystified as she was. By the time she returned to the hotel, she had run out of ways to talk herself out of it. She was worried.

"Man," Frohike said. "I don't like it. That's not like him."

"I know," Scully said. "So I got them to open his room for me." She'd had to flash her badge at the desk clerk, and then at his supervisor, and finally at the manager, but eventually they got the key and went with her to Mulder's room. "It was empty. No Mulder, no luggage, no clothes. It looked like he'd never even been there."

She heard a low whistle, and then Langly's voice. "Holy shi..."

"Had the maids been in? Did they see anything?" Byers interrupted.

"They had. He wasn't there then, either. And of course they changed all the sheets and towels, so I didn't have any kind of evidence, of... of anything." 

Scully had wished desperately that she'd had something to go on, but there was nothing. She was acutely aware that it was because she'd waited too long. She had gone back to her room. She'd sat down at the desk. She'd stared for a long time at the traitorous, silent phone before she'd picked it up and made this call to the Gunmen.

"We'd better start by running down his credit cards," Byers suggested.

"Okay. I got that," Langly said quickly. "I'll get on it right now."

"How do..." Scully started to ask how they had the numbers, but realized at the same instant that they hadn't pressed her for any of the awkward details they must be wondering about. She decided she was better off returning the courtesy.

Frohike said, "Donaldsonville, you said? I'll get on all the local car rental places."

"I'll see what I can do about his cell phone," Byers added. "And what's the name of the hotel, Agent Scully? I might find something in their phones, too."

"It's the Plantation Inn," she said, surprised. "It's... wait, let me see -- " she picked up a piece of the hotel stationery from the desk -- "2179 Highway 70."

"Agent Scully," Frohike said tentatively, "does Skinner know any of this yet?"

"God, no," she groaned. Her head hurt just thinking about that. She closed her eyes for a moment. "He's my next phone call." 

"We'll get started, then," Byers said. "We'll call you as soon as we get anything."

"Yes," she said. "Please. Call me right away." She lifted her head and looked out the window into the parking lot, and realized that right now she'd actually be glad, in a strange way, to see that grey Jeep pulling in tonight the way it had only a few nights ago.

"Wait," she murmured. "I should..."

"What's that, Agent Scully?" Byers asked.

"Nothing." Scully sat up. "I just realized I should..." She swallowed hard. "There's one more phone call I could make."

Chapter Nineteen

Denny walked from the bathroom through her bedroom, tying the sash at the waist of her robe. She came into the living room and reached up to steady the towel wrapped around her wet hair as she leaned down to look at the answering machine on her desk; frowning a little, she straightened up. The phone had rung twice while she was in the shower, but the little red message light burned steady and unblinking. 

A call at nearly eleven-thirty at night was never good news, she thought. She couldn't help associating late-hour phone calls with hurried trips to the scenes of accidents and homicides; she couldn't help wondering, now, if someone had finally found a child's body, and if it had been Jim calling to break the news. 

She wiped absently with the edge of the towel at a few drops of water that had escaped and were trickling down her neck. If it had been Jim, he would have left a message, wouldn't he? Even if it was just for her to call him back? She picked up the receiver and tapped the three keys that would give her the number of the most recent incoming call.

"The number of your latest call is --" and the recorded voice paused a moment -- "202... 555... 6431. To be connected to this number, press the pound key now."

Denny didn't recognize the number, but knew it was a DC area cell-phone code. She frowned again, pursing her lips; then, as the stilted voice began to repeat its announcement, she set down the receiver. She'd had enough weird stuff going on lately, she thought. She wasn't going to court trouble. "If somebody really wants to talk to me," she murmured, "they'll call back." She turned away and went back toward the bedroom, loosening the towel and rubbing it across her hair.

Almost as if that someone had heard her, the phone rang again just as she was picking up her hair dryer. She set it down beside the sink and went back into the living room and picked up the phone before the machine could answer. "Hello?"

There was a moment's pause before a woman said hesitantly, "Hello... Dr. Dennison?"

"Yes," Denny answered, not quite able to place the voice.

"Dr. Dennison, this is Dana Scully."

"Agent Scully," she repeated, surprised. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm sorry to call you so late. I was hoping you could..." Scully began, and then seemed to stumble over her words. She cleared her throat. "Excuse me." Denny heard her take a deep breath. "I haven't seen Agent Mulder today, and I've been unable to reach him by phone. I was wondering if you'd, ah... heard from him."

"If I'd...? Well, no," Denny answered, puzzled. "Have you asked Sheriff Cormerais?"

"Yes," the agent said. "I spoke to him about two hours ago. He hadn't seen him either." There was something about the woman's tone that made Denny uneasy. "I hesitated to call you, but I just hoped -- that you..."

Denny's vague unease began to turn to alarm. Her knees felt weak; she clutched at the edge of the desk, and sank into the chair beside it. "I think Jim might be more likely to be in touch with Agent Mulder than I am," she said as steadily as she could. 

There was a long, excruciating moment of silence from the other end of the phone. 

"I'm sorry," Scully said suddenly. "I've been presumptuous. Please excuse me," and she hung up.

Denny slowly lowered the receiver from her ear to her lap. She stared down at it, and at the remnants of the red polish that still clung stubbornly to the cuticles of her nails.

*I don't like the way he looks at you,* Jim had said. 

The red nail polish. The missing evenings. 

The way he looked at her. 

"No," she whispered, lowering her head to the desk, curling into herself. She didn't feel the phone slipping from her fingers and dropping to the floor. "No. Oh, God, please, no..."

The weight of what she might have done, what she *must* have done, was overwhelming. She felt for a moment that it would crush her and drive the breath from her lungs, and maybe that would be better, after all -- better for it to all be over with; better for Jim to find her here and grieve for her and to go on than to have to find out how she'd betrayed him. Better for her, too, to be done with all of this, to be at peace, instead of living with this growing feeling that there was a stranger hiding somewhere inside her.

Still, slumped against the desk, her body too heavy to move, she kept breathing. 

She ought to do something, she knew. She ought to do something, anything, to shake off the growing, shadowy feeling that she wasn't really *here,* that she was only some kind of story someone else was telling. This was the feeling that came before the chunks of missing time -- she understood that whenever she felt it, but she seemed to forget again when she came back to herself afterward. 

Do something, she told herself. Remind yourself of who and where you are. Stand up. Sit up. Just reach down and pick up the phone. Just lift your head -- just *move.* Just lift one finger, and break the spell...

It was no use. The struggle had been too hard and gone on too long, and she didn't have the heart to fight anymore. She let out a long sigh as her eyes slipped shut and she surrendered.

Chapter Twenty 

Mulder swam up through the murky depths and blinked against the light and against the dull throbbing in his head. A figure was leaning over him; in the glare of the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, its face was in shadow. He squinted groggily and turned his head a little, trying to make out the features.

"Ah, there you are," Paula said, not unkindly. "I was starting to get a little worried."

"Worried?" The word came out with a great deal less force than he'd intended. "Strange way to put it."

Paula didn't answer. She stepped over his legs as he lay on the floor and knelt down next to him; her fingers probed his injured shoulder, apparently assessing the damage.

"Easy," he grunted, gritting his teeth.

She frowned and shook her head. "I was thinking collarbone, but I don't know. This could be scapular, could even involve the acromion process -- soft tissue damage too. I'd need an x-ray to tell." She removed her hands from his shoulder and sat back on her heels. "Sorry about that. But the stairs... and you were dead weight."

He opened his mouth, but it took a moment's effort to form the words. "Sorry to be such an inconvenience." Was that his weapon holstered there on her hip? He knew he was in no condition to try to take it back from her.

"You'll want a drink, Fox," she was saying, reaching around behind her and picking up a bottle of water. She twisted the lid off and held it out to him. He eyed it suspiciously and made no move to take it.

Paula watched as he hesitated; an expression of annoyance flitted across her features. "Fine," she said. She screwed the cap back onto the bottle and set it next to him on the floor. "I'll leave it there. You can think it over." 

She stood up and walked back across the basement toward the steps. Mulder thought she was going to climb them and leave him alone again, but instead she turned and sat down on the stairs. She pulled her feet up one step higher, her bare toes curling over the edge of the wooden board, and studied Mulder for some time.

"You know," she said at length, "we have to talk, Fox."

Wincing, he turned his head a little further toward her. "I'm listening," he said, but for a long time she only sat silently watching him. 

"What I still can't figure out," she finally said, "is why you came down here." 

"Two of the victims were from outside Louisiana," he answered wearily. "State lines. Federal jurisdiction. You know about that."

"You can stop fooling, Fox. Of course I know about Federal jurisdiction." One corner of her mouth lifted in a bemused half-smile. 

Mulder took a deep breath. There was something important here, he was sure; he had to try to think coherently so that he could figure out what it was. He closed his eyes for a moment but abandoned it when he felt the way the floor seemed to shift beneath him as he did.

"I came," he said slowly, "to investigate what appeared to be a serial killer."

"No, no." She shook her head. "That's not what I mean. Why did you come -- you, specifically? I wasn't expecting anybody so impressive."

He studied her for a long moment, considering his answer. She was perched on the edge of the step, her arms folded and resting on her knees; her eyes were bright and inquisitive. He wished he had some way to clear the fog from his head.

"I requested assignment to this case," he said carefully. "Certain features of these killings were very similar to some others my partner and I have looked into before. We thought we might find a connection." 

He could tell before he'd finished speaking that it had been the wrong answer. Paula's eyes narrowed; her eager expression faded and became a frown. 

"Don't try to play any more games with me," she said darkly. "What were you thinking, Fox? Was it a miscalculation? Or were you just so brazen as to think you wouldn't be recognized?"

"Paula. I don't know what you're talking about..."

"This one was too big to send just anybody, wasn't it? You had to come yourself for this one," she said angrily, rising from the stairs. "You had to come here to find out who'd been killing your own!"

She leaned over him, her long blonde hair hanging down to frame her face, its ends catching the light and turning gold even as it kept her face in shadow. "You know what really got me?" she burst out. "You were so damned arrogant. You came waltzing right in here, dropping all these little tidbits about your sister being abducted, about your father working for the State Department. You never thought I'd put it together, did you? You thought you could just toy with me."

Mulder kept quiet, hoping not to anger her more. After staring down at him for a long moment, Paula turned away and went back to the stairs and picked up a pack of cigarettes from one of the lower steps. She tapped the pack against the heel of her hand and then peeled back the cellophane wrapper from the top.

"I didn't know it was you," Mulder offered. "I didn't know it was you before I got here."

She paused, a cigarette halfway out of the pack. "Well, maybe not," she said, her voice softening. A thoughtful expression passed across her face. "No. No, actually, I don't think you did." She took the cigarette out and set the pack down again. "You wouldn't be here like this if you'd known in time. I'm sure you'd have been more careful." 

Mulder, encouraged, waited while she took her lighter out of her pocket and lit the cigarette from its flame. "I'm not one of them," he tried again.

"Please. I've done my homework," she drawled scornfully, the hard edge coming back to her voice. She pointed an accusing finger at him. "I know who your father was. I know who *you* are. I know you gave your partner up to them just the way your father gave up your sister. Just like Edward Dennison gave up his only child." 

"No!" Mulder protested. "I never did." He lifted his head, fighting the wave of nausea that rolled over him. "She knows I didn't." With some effort, he held his head up, held her gaze; Paula only watched him impassively, and said nothing. 

"You have to believe me," he said faintly as he laid his head down again. "I'm not one of them, Paula. I'm a victim, just like you."

Paula tossed her own head indignantly. "I'm no victim!" she exclaimed. "Maybe the rest of us are, but not me. I'm the one who's doing something about it." She exhaled a long plume of smoke. "And if you didn't know so much about what's going on, I'd have done something about *you* by now, too." 

She crouched down to grind the cigarette butt out against the floor. "You're going to have to talk to me eventually, Fox," she said, and walked over toward him to grasp the end of the chain that dangled from the light bulb overhead.

Mulder let his eyes slip half-shut. "She'll find me," he groaned softly, uttering aloud the one thought that had sustained him thus far. "Scully will find me."

"I don't see how she could," Paula said. She tugged at the chain and the familiar darkness fell around Mulder. "After all, who's she going to run into who knows where you are?" 

Mulder listened to the sound of her bare feet padding up the stairs, and then the door opened and closed again, and he was alone.

Chapter Twenty-One

On Monday morning Scully sat at the little desk by the window in her room. She stared out at the sullen grey morning, telephone pressed to her ear, punching the familiar number on the keypad almost by rote. She tangled the phone cord unconsciously, aimlessly, between her restless fingers, waiting for the answering voice.

"Federal Bureau of Investigation," it said at last. "How may I direct your call?"

"Assistant Director Walter Skinner, please." 

"One moment, please." 

She had to listen to a long passage of bland instrumental music before Kimberly picked up. "Good morning, Assistant Director Skinner's office. How may I help you?"

"This is Dana Scully," she said simply. She just didn't have the little pleasantries in her this morning. "I need to speak to --"

"Please hold, Agent Scully," Kimberly cut in quickly. "The Assistant Director has been waiting for your call." The music came back. 

Waiting? Scully herself had been fretfully waiting since before the cold, sunless daybreak until a decent hour to call, until she thought there was even a slight chance Skinner would be in the office. It was only five after eight. How long could he have been there?

"Agent Scully."

"Sir," she said. "Is there any news?"

"There are people running down the passenger manifests now, Agent." He sighed. "You've done this kind of thing before. You know it takes a little time."

"Yes, sir." She kept her tone level, even as she crumpled inside. "I know that." She looked out the window; the morning was still bleak. It looked like rain. "But something is *wrong* with this. He wouldn't..."

"There's nothing yet to suggest he didn't, and everything to suggest he's tried pretty hard to cover his tracks," Skinner said, his voice strained. "Five sets of plane tickets booked, going to five different destinations? That was just to throw us off, to buy him time. And you said this woman we assume he's traveling with was some kind of child abductee..." He sighed heavily, and his voice softened. "Scully, it wouldn't be the first time he's gone off half-cocked. Not by a long stretch. I'm sorry, but this has 'Mulder' written all over it." 

She knew that; she knew it looked that way. But this couldn't be how it ended. After all she had seen and done and gone through with him, he couldn't take up with someone else and just walk away. She felt betrayed; she felt angry that this woman could have appeared and simply taken what she had come to think of as her own. But most of all, she felt ashamed that she had never taken it herself, even though he had offered it to her so many times and so many ways over the years.

"Agent Scully, are you there?" Skinner asked on the other end of the phone.

"Yes. I'm sorry." The first drops of rain tapped dully against the windowpane, and she reached up, tracing with a fingertip the slow descent of one fat drop down the outside of the glass. "I was just thinking."

"The New Orleans field office has everyone they can spare on this, Scully," Skinner said, still in that same unaccustomed, gentle tone. "Keep going at your end. We'll get to the bottom of it."

"Thank you, sir."

"Check in with me again after you speak to Agent Corwin in New Orleans. I'll call you immediately if we come up with something sooner."

"Yes, sir," she said. "Goodbye." She set the receiver down slowly, gently, in the cradle, and stared searchingly out the window into the thickening rain.

Chapter Twenty-Two

There were ghosts in the room, wraiths of conversations she'd had with him; her own heartless words hung in the air all around her. There was no escaping. "Get some sleep," she was saying, watching him turn the little fabric hearts over in his hands, hearing his mirthless bark of laughter in response. "Oh, brother," she was muttering, loud enough for him to hear, in that hospital room in the Barbados. She was letting her hands fall away from his face, there on the threshold of his apartment the day after Diana had died, and she was walking away. How could she have walked away?

Scully sighed and lifted her head. She raised her hands to her face, and pulled her reading glasses off; she set them down and rubbed at her tired eyes with her fingertips.

"You okay?" Cormerais asked from across the table. "More coffee?"

"No," she sighed, reaching for her glasses. "Not yet, anyway. Thanks." She focused again on the lengthy printed columns of names and seat numbers on the page, trying to ignore the wave of weary hopelessness that lapped at her.

"Your people in Washington..." the sheriff began, and Scully cut him off, not caring that she was interrupting, too tired to think about being polite.

"They have the same lists," she said tonelessly. She adjusted her glasses again, more to give her hands something to do than because they were out of place. "The passenger manifests from each flight. My, ah... consultants that I mentioned, they have the same lists. So does the New Orleans field office. They're all going over them too." She made a pencil mark next to the name of Grace Carames, checking her off, and moved the wooden ruler she was using as a straightedge down one column. 

"You still haven't convinced me we're going to find anything in here," the sheriff said, and Scully looked up.

"We are the two people who know them best," she said again, slowly and deliberately, as if she were explaining something necessary to a stubborn child -- which was, in fact, pretty much the way she had begun to feel. "We are the people most likely to recognize the aliases they might be traveling under. We are the people most likely to be able to weed out the real flight from the decoys."

"Aliases, decoys -- this is crazy. This isn't Denny," he answered sourly. "This is just *not* Denny."

"The evidence suggests --"

"The evidence suggests that your partner is the one who has a habit of vanishing," Cormerais said sharply. "The evidence suggests that you two showed up here and started finding crazy, nonexistant connections between your serial killer and the disappearance of a little girl, a case that was hard on Denny in the first place, and that now your partner..." He sat back, pushing the papers away from him in obvious disgust. "The evidence suggests to me that Denny's the victim here, and you're treating her like a suspect."

Scully opened her mouth, and closed it again on her first, impulsive answer, and took a deep breath before answering. "Sheriff," she said carefully, "I do understand that it may seem that way to you, but I assure you, I am only interested in locating Agent Mulder and Dr. Dennison and ensuring their safety." She pushed her reading glasses back up into place on her nose and bent her head to the list again.

"Uh-huh," Cormerais replied, clearly unconvinced. He appeared to have given up all pretense of studying the passenger manifest; from the corner of her eye Scully could see him leaning back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, watching her. She moved the ruler down the rows on the paper, checking names off with her pencil. She refused to give him the satisfaction of looking up again.

A few minutes passed in this fashion. Scully found it harder and harder to concentrate with that man glowering at her from across the table. She wanted to say something about it, and was wondering exactly how sharp-tongued she could be without losing whatever vestige of cooperation she might still get from him, when he spoke.

"Whose idea was it to come here in the first place, Agent Scully -- yours, or his?"

She lifted her head and fixed him in a cold stare. "I beg your pardon?"

"You two come down here saying you're looking for a serial killer." He unfolded his arms and laid them on the table, leaning forward to stare directly into Scully's face. "Then you start sniffing around this missing-child case as if you had a right to. Denny tells me you knew her name from her last work for the FBI, and that was a case with a kid who went missing, too. Now she drops off the face of the earth, and your partner's conveniently gone, too. Maybe you think I'm just some hick sheriff who's too stupid to put it all together, but I'm not as stupid as you were counting on."

Scully set her pencil down. She took off her glasses and set them beside it. "Exactly what are you implying, Sheriff?"

Cormerais studied her for a long moment, as if sizing her up. "How well do you know your partner?" he finally asked.

Scully found herself slowly rising to her feet. "I know him very well," she replied through nearly-clenched teeth. "If you have a point, get to it."

The sheriff nodded. "I may not have the kind of pull you have, but I have enough to find out a few things," he said angrily. "Like that Agent Mulder doesn't exactly have the most sterling record in the FBI. That he's been involved in more than a few shady things. That he's been brought up on disciplinary charges more than once. Now are you still gonna stand here and tell me Denny's the one who's made him disappear?"

"Did Dr. Dennison tell you about the circumstances of that case I remembered her name from?" Scully asked hotly.

"It was a little girl who died. She had some kind of genetic disease."

"And did she tell you about two women who worked at the medical research facility with that girl's father?" She was nearly shaking with rage. It was hard to keep from shouting. "They were murdered, Sheriff, within a month of that child's death. The homicides were very unusual. Each woman died from a single stab wound, right at the base of the skull."

She watched the weight of her words sink in, watched the color slowly drain from the sheriff's face. She took her hands from her hips and placed them on the table, leaning toward him. 

"How well do you know Dr. Dennison, Sheriff?" 

Before he could answer, Scully's cell phone shrilled from her purse. They both turned and stared at it for a moment, and then she snatched up the purse and plucked the phone out.

"Sc-" In her haste to answer, she fumbled with the phone, catching her earring against it; when she bit her lip to keep from exclaiming at the sudden jab, she bit too hard, and then that hurt, too. "Scully."

"Scully, it's Frohike. We've got a little something."

On another day she might have noticed that he had dropped her title and skipped all the little flirtatious little niceteies that usually peppered his speech to her, but the depth of her anxiety was so great now that it only skipped across the surface like a pebble. "What is it?" she asked. She picked up her notepad and a pen from the table, and stepped away from the table toward the doorway into the hall.

"Those plane tickets -- the charges to his Visa and Amex? You know they were all done over the phone. We've confirmed a common source for two of the calls, and I'm guessing the rest will go there too if we keep tracking."

"I suppose I don't want to know how you trace these things," she said. She propped the phone between her shoulder and her ear, and flipped the notepad to a fresh page.

"I couldn't tell you if you asked. It would put you in too much danger," Frohike answered in a momentary flare of his usual style. "You ready to take this down?"

"Yeah. Go."

"The phone's in the name of an Edward Dennison, in a town called Darrow. It's right across the Mississippi River there, just a stone's throw away from you. That ring any bells?"

"Edward?" She rubbed at her sore earlobe and spared a sidelong glance for the sheriff, who was sitting quietly, staring down at his folded hands. "Edward doesn't. But Dennison... You got an address on that, Frohike?"

"I don't. The bill goes to a post office box. I may be able to get an address, but it's going to take time, just like it will to track down the rest of those phone calls. And time..."

"And we don't know if we have time," Scully said flatly. "I'll get moving on it. Thanks, Frohike. You guys just -- just keep..."

"Keep going. I know. We will," he said.

"Thanks." She snapped the phone shut and turned back to the sheriff. He looked up at her approach, his expression still a little dazed.

"Edward Dennison," she said shortly. "What's the connection?"

His eyes narrowed. "What do you mean -- the connection?" 

"I mean, who is Edward Dennison? I have evidence that appears to tie him to this case."

"Well, wouldn't that be interesting," Cormerais drawled, rising to the challenge again, "seeing as he's been dead nearly three years now? You suppose he reached out from beyond the grave to tell his daughter it was okay to go off with your Agent Mulder?"

"Did he live in Darrow?" she shot back, ignoring his remark. "Because those plane tickets --" she pointed toward the passenger manifests spread out on the table -- "that were charged to Mulder's credit cards, over the phone? The calls originated in Darrow from the number of an Edward Dennison."

That seemed to shake Cormerais again. "He -- he lived in Darrow," he admitted. "But that house is empty. Denny's been saying all this time she's going to sell it, but she never has."

"Come on," Scully said, picking her coat up from the back of the chair and pulling it on. "Let's go."

"Where, to Darrow? Do you think they're --"

"Now!" Scully barked, heading for the door. The sheriff followed in her wake.

--- Continued ---


End file.
